Pagan Poetry
by flecksofpoppy
Summary: Just before meeting up with Noin to go and fight Zechs, Trowa stands in a river and thinks of fate on a hot day in Italy.


**Pagan Poetry**  
The song "Pagan Poetry" is © Bjork.  
Completed 2001. A different take on a songfic. Italicized lines indicate song lyrics.

They were sitting out by the river inside an oven-baked day, sweat dripping down their skin and water gushing down their throats. It was supposed to be cooler here, but it only had the noise of coolness, a swift rushing of water that washed over their ears like an auditory flood. Comfort came in small measures.

Paris is lovely in the springtime-someone had been singing that song as they left the last town, warbling dryly in a voice reeking of too much beer drank in the sun. If Paris were lovely in the spring time, then Italy was hell in the summer for outsiders and especially for colony dwellers. The sun burned down upon the red and yellow land hotly, and upon Heero and Trowa as they sat by the running water. Out here however, there was no one to make any noise, just the faint swallows of their throats.

Heero was looking at a map; not even a breeze ruffled it. He was studying its contours closely, keeping one hand over his brow to block the sunlight and one finger tracing a snake-shaped path down the paper country. They were near the bottom, and the finger had stopped near the town where they passed through, then continued to slide down to their final destination.

"Hey!" someone called from across the way suddenly, a dark skinned man who had a robust, country-like appearance about him and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, fat with tobacco, that hung lazily out of his mouth. "Do you two want a ride back into town?"

"Not necessary," Heero called back without looking up, and his finger stopped suddenly right at the bottom.

The man shrugged, called "Suit yourself!" and flicked the finished cigarette down onto the clay-baked riverside. It smoldered for a moment, then burned out and the heel of his Italian boot ground it roughly into the earth. He walked back towards a battered pick-up truck and disappeared from sight.

Heero's finger jabbed the outline of Italy on the map, signaling where they would end their trip, far south of Rome at the tip of the country. Beyond that, there was only ocean, a white blank space. Trowa looked at him, confused, as he realized that where Heero had been pointed was exactly where they were. He didn't answer the look, just folded the map into a neat square and slid it into a side-pocket of the bag that sat next to them.

"We aren't going much further," he finally said, standing up. "I have already offered my life to all living relatives of the Noventa family. There is nowhere else to go now." He looked blankly at the sparkling river, rushing along its path. Like fate, it could only go in one direction toward the eternal, open ocean.

"You already know what I think," Trowa looked perturbed, and continued to sit, not looking over at Heero. His hands clenched into fists in his lap, but he didn't say anything further.

"If we haven't been followed already, then we are at least being watched now," he stated, crossing his arms over his chest, looking for all the world as if he would very much like to stay by the river for the rest of his life despite his uneasy words. He looked tired.

"Yes," was all Trowa replied, and suddenly he bent and began to unlace his boots. Heero watched him without comment, just kept his arms folded and waited. The boots were kicked off with uncharacteristic abandon, socks peeled away from where they had been tread in for weeks, and Trowa stood up and walked to the riverside. For a moment, he didn't step into the water, his back to Heero as he stood straight and rigid against the heat of the day.

There were circular rivulets reflected on the river bed as he looked into the water, and he saw a fish shining brightly in a nearby shallow. His hand was still clenched and he slowly let it go, looking down to see the indentations of half-circles, and he felt pain in his palm. He waded a little deeper, let both is feet submerge in the cold clear water that rushed around him like a live thing and then his jeans got wet. His eyes closed and he was blind.

_Pedaling through the dark currents_ he was seeing a darkness the same color as Heero's eyes, that terrible determined look that spoke of haggard righteousness, of fatigue. He was the full circle where angry half-arcs were concerned, the guiding light of a bright round sun. But inside...

"_I find an accurate copy-a blueprint_," he thought. A plan-the plan. But it was for everyone, Heero was for everyone. It was... "_of the pleasure in me_." He let his hands hang open and limp, and accepted the direction the river was rushing in.

He went in deeper, until the water was up to his shins and rising almost to the pockets of his jeans, and it pulled and tugged at him, urging him along in a thousand little prickling whispers of a promised end. Like a Siren singing, it told him that Paris was lovely in the springtime, that the ocean was lovely in the end, that it was almost time to go. It was almost time to die, and he felt no more pain.

Sunstroke. He felt as if he had sunstroke as he turned to hear Heero calling him, and yet it seemed very far away. The bright bobbing face under the tree where they had been sitting had two gaping deep blue holes, two wells to salvation. The holes rose as the body attached to them stood, and then looked slack in the heat, had that same brand of fatigue that all the wounded in body looked like. The figure idly watched Trowa for a moment, and then reached into his pack where he pulled out a small wreath of rot-darkened flowers. Mrs. Noventa had presented the two with a bouquet before they left, and she had let a tear slip down her time ridden face at some tragedy they couldn't understand.

Heero let them go into the river like the trimmings for a death casket, and the _swirling black lilies, totally ripe_ washed by Trowa at a swift speed toward their final resting place.

"It's time to go," he said, and Trowa nodded but didn't move.

He went into the river after Trowa and stood with him for a moment before grabbing his shoulder, then he offers a handshake, crooked five fingers form a pattern yet to be matched in any sort of star arrangement that Trowa had ever felt, and the handshake became an anchor which pulled him back to shore slowly. The fish in the shallows shivered as it darted into some other part of the river suddenly, a flash of silver fading into the dark shadows. The swirling black lilies had long disappeared, and the river seemed to quiet as Heero pulled him back to the land.

Their hands together created _a secret code carved in a palm of fingers_, erasing the painful half-arcs of imperfection, smoothing impurity, brushing away questions of dissenting passion from the palette of their yellow, red and dark blue day. _They form a pattern yet to be matched._

"Let's go back," he said, as Heero fished him out of the river. "It's time, now that you've completed your necessities."

Their footsteps left the river behind, and they walked side by side in the heat, the sweat dripping again like a steady shedding of water from their bodies, a guarantee of perspiring a soul right out through their pores if they each had ever had one. The road was hard and long under their feet and Trowa's boots squelched with every step forward, reminding him of deep water. Heero's steps fell in tread with his and the morse coding signals pulsate.

"_Wake me up from hibernate_." He was no longer blind and now could see his world of angry half-arcs and foreshadowing; fate was terrible.

_On the surface simplicity_ was between them, two men walking down a road in the same direction as a river flowing towards fate. One of them the circle that would come back to know itself over and over again, and one realizing that the same circle was rooted deep inside him, even though he could never have it.

"This is the _darkest pit in me_." He remembered Heero's hand over his like _pagan poetry_, but only for a wink of the hot Italian sun did he think it was his alone.


End file.
